sudden I was struck by the idea that plants,
having many human qualities, may also in some degree have human
motives--that they are not altogether mere automata--and as I
thought, I began to imagine that I could detect something
resembling purpose in the movements of certain plants. I have
jotted down a few notes, and you will see when I expand them that
at any rate the idea calls attention to the movements themselves,
some of which seem never to have been noticed at all, or certainly
at best very inadequately. You will see that this brings in the
bamboo-garden and Buddha, and so keeps to the scheme of
_Veluvana_."

The monasteries of twelfth-century Japanese Buddhism, which he had
visited long before in the neighbourhood of Kioto, now recurred to his
memory, and he proposed to describe in what a monk of Hiyeisan differed
from an Indian Buddhist monk. This was a theme of extraordinary
interest, and wholly germane to his purpose. It drove him back to his
Japanese books, and to his friend Sir Ernest Satow's famous dictionary.
He wrote to me:--

"No praise can be too high for the work which Satow did in the
early days of our intercourse with Japan. He was a valuable asset
to England, and to Sir Harry Parkes, who, with all his energy and
force of character, would never have succeeded as he did without
Satow. Aston was another very strong man."

These reveries were strictly in accordance with the spirit of
_Veluvana_, but unfortunately what Lord Redesdale wrote in this
direction proved to be too slight for publication. He met with some
expressions of extremely modern Japanese opinion which annoyed him, and
to which he was tempted to give more attention than they deserve. It
began to be obvious that the enterprise was one for which great
concentration of effort, and a certain serenity of purpose which was not
to be secured at will, were imperatively needed. In leaving London, he
was not content, and no one could have wished him to be willing, to
break abruptly all the cords of his past life. He was still a Trustee of
the National Gallery, still chairman of the Marlborough Club, still
occupied with the administration of the Wallace Collection, and he did
not abate his interest in these directions. They made it necessary that
he should come up to town every other week. This made up in some measure
for the inevitable disappointment of finding that in